Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Continuing the commentary on the Wolf of Wall Street, I too must be ferocious like a wolf in this culture war, but of Main
rather than Wall Street. As are my heroes in the conflict, like Robert
Reich, Paul Krugman, Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ed
Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Randi Rhodes etc. It is truly a continuation of
the eternal battle between the good, the bad and the ugly (talk about classic art.) The Lord of the Rings mythology has nothing on this apocalyptic conflagration.*

And no, I do not accept that to be 'integral' one must be
trans-partisan. The emerging P2P paradigm is like any other meme,
integral or otherwise, that must transcend and replace
the prior worldview with its own partisan agenda, aka 'right view.'
Include some aspects (or basic structures), sure, but the worldview and
moral enactment, no. Even the likes of Buddhism must undergo a new (or
at least updated secular) 'right view', like in Batchelor and Panikkar.

At this link. Especially in light of new orgs like Peers. A few excerpts:

"Thomas Friedman, and others, have recently extolled the virtues of the sharing economy. [...] Mr. Friedman writes enthusiastically about a future where we will
typically: rent out our power tools, give each other rides, and provide
cleaning services -- all via Internet-based platforms such as Airbnb.
We'll achieve a brave new world where each of us will be (in Mr.
Friedman's words) a 'micro-entrepreneur.' That's kind of like being a
real entrepreneur, except you won't have: a regular salary, paid
vacations, employer-provided health insurance, or a chance of getting
rich from an IPO. Being a 'micro-entrepreneur' in this brave new world
seems instead just a euphemism for being an employee, except with
reduced compensation, job security, benefits and protections.

Speaking of the Devil, I just saw the movie on Friday. Talk about the
height of sales and advertising without depth and integrity. Here is the typical regressive agenda in action. Check out this open letter
from the daughter of one of the Wolf's co-conspirators. She makes a
good point that the movie glorifies the not only unethical but illegal
conduct while spending no time on the devastating effects to victims.
Instead of instilling in us a sense of injustice we want to be like him;
it's the American Way.

The following is from Senator Bernie Sanders. In light of the Wolf of Wall Street see his agenda for a clear differentiation
of healthy progressive social values framed to go straight to the
limbic system. Rhetoric is more on the side of art, as any salesperson
knows, and it can be done ethically with the social good at heart and in
practice. And we can all make a healthy 'profit' or surplus that can go
to creating new heights of developmental advance for all. We just need more like Bernie Sanders making our laws. This is what a progressive agenda for the New Year looks like:

"When Congress reconvenes for the 2014 session, here are a few of the issues that I will be focusing on.

WEALTH AND INCOME INEQUALITY:
A nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so
much while so many have so little. It is simply not acceptable that the
top 1 percent owns 38 percent of the financial wealth of the nation,
while the bottom 60 percent owns all of 2.3 percent. We need to
establish a progressive tax system which asks the wealthy to start
paying their fair share of taxes, and which ends the outrageous
loopholes that enable one out of four corporations to pay nothing in
federal income taxes.

JOBS: We need to make
significant investments in our crumbling infrastructure, in energy
efficiency and sustainable energy, in early childhood education and in
affordable housing. When we do that, we not only improve the quality of
life in our country and combat global warming, we also create millions
of decent paying new jobs.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Here's a preview of a new book, Mathematical Reasoning: Analogies, Metaphors, Images
edited by Lyn D. English (2013, Routledge). Part II is written by
Lakoff and Nunez, "Cognitive foundations for a mind-based mathematics."
From L&N, chapter 2:

“This is an essay within a new field of
study – the cognitive science of mathematics. […] You might think that
this enterprise would leave mathematics as it exists alone and simply
add to it an account of the conceptual nature of mathematical
understanding. You could not be more wrong. Studying the nature of
mathematical ideas changes what we understand mathematics to be and it
even changes the understanding of particular mathematical results.”

This L&N quote supports Bryant's wonderings about universal mathematical structures and provides the material (embodied) basis for those structures:

"But what if it ironically turned out that our cognition of
universals was, in fact, rendered possible through material objects?
Here the thesis wouldn’t be that we abstract from material objects to
form universal concepts, but rather that material objects do
the work of abstraction for us. [...] For Clark it is not an already
operative concept that allows us to engage in these forms of reasoning,
but rather a concrete object that renders these forms of reasoning
possible. [...] Now that we’ve erased the particularity of objects
through the intervention of another object– either a signifier or the
'+' and '=' toys –it becomes possible to think more abstract identities
and difference. As Clark puts it, we can now think relations between
relations. [...] Score one for nominalism!

This should be good. Haidt is one of the questioners and wrote an apology for conservatism in The Righteous Mind,
basically framing values in their language and then judging liberals by
that framing. Chris Hedges ripped him a new assholon in this post, and spiral dynamicist Bruce Gibb gave it a developmental review here. Since Harris is a moral developmentalist (and pluralist) it will be interesting to see how he approaches this regressive. The video follows with more commentary thereafter.

I'm
putting the following in the real/false reason thread, even though it's a criticism of
the speculative realists Harman and Meillassoux, because they also
commit that same sort of realist fallacies inherent to the mathematical
model of complexity. That is, the notion of some sort of Platonic and/or
Aristotelian eternal or categorial essences outside time in an eternal
presence. Note that Bryant is not guilty of this, as noted elsewhere,
per his essay "Time of the object."
I also referred to this elsewhere as the difference between shentong
and rantong Buddhism, noting how Harman and even Morton are shentong in
this regard (like here and following).

“Derrida’s argument is [..] that in Western metaphysics, time and
again, there is a naïve assertion of some X transcending the play of
differences, something not given over to the vagaries of time, an
eternal essence beyond historicity” (85).

“For Harman, Derrida cannot be a realist since he denies the
principle of identity, which is a strange, if all-too-well known, a
priori investigation of things as they are—a presumption of identity
that is then circled back to. But that reverses it: Derrida’s 'realism'
precisely relates to his demonstration of difference as that which, over
time, makes any self-identity impossible in the first place” (86).

I found a relevant passage in Levin's Sites of Vision (MIT
Press, 1999), the chapter on Derrida and Foucault. The entire chapter up
to this point was Derrida's refutation of the metaphor of light and
vision, equating it with the metaphysics of presence. But when the
metaphor extends to how blinding light diffuses any distinctive
presencing Levin notes:

“Without disputing the heliocentrism
and ocularcentrism of metaphysics, Derrida will argue, however, that,
contrary to first appearances, the logic of this sun-and-light-centered
discourse does not in fact entail, or necessitate, a metaphysics of
presence—on the contrary, the more one thinks about the matter, the more
one will be compelled to acknowledge that the logic of this metaphorics
actually resists, and even subverts, the possibility of presence. Thus
he asks us to reflect on the phenomenology actually implicit in the
logic of this metaphorics: 'Presence disappearing in its own radiance,
the hidden source of light, of truth, and of meaning, the erasure of the
visage of Being—such must be the insistent return of that which
subjects metaphysics to metaphor.' Here we can see Derrida's
deconstructive strategy at work—that is, at play: he uses the
metaphorics of light to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence, that
very presence that the visual generation of metaphyics has been thought
to support. If this is a Hegelian Aufhebung, it is a sublation with a
mischievous, chiasmic twist."

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Murray also has a draft paper available for the upcoming volume on critical realism and integral theory in which Balder will also be featured (1). This is interesting from p. 3, in that Bhaskar said "categories are not
to be viewed as something which the subjective observer imposes on
reality; rather categories such as causality, substance, process,
persons, etc. — if valid — are constitutive of reality as such,
irrespective of their categorization by observers or thought." L&J
explicitly state in PF that our basic categories are part of human
embodiment and not outside us in reality. I questioned that though in this post which may be more akin to Bhaskar.

Compare the following in the section "are categories in nature?" with my linked post above:

Meaning, why aren't we ending poverty. Answer? Regressive policy is a war on the poor. And their war continues to cut their benefits as if that will get them up off their lazy ass and get a job. It's their very approach and worldview that perpetuates poverty and further enriches the top. And they have no clue that this is the case. Hence in a few days 1.3 million will lose an extension to unemployment benefits and many more will be either cut from, or receive drastically reduced, food stamp benefits. That will teach those poor people; starve them to death and then they'll go get that job.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Part of why I like London Grammar's cover are the flaws. The guitarist has that
screeching sliding sound as he slides between chords. The singer's voice
has some choppy transitions between notes and octaves. The keyboardist
at times hits the keys too abruptly. On the other hand, I also really
like the 'perfect' engineered studio sound of the original, so here it
is.

"This essay explores the possibility of a complete secular
redefinition of Buddhism. It argues that such a secular re-formation
would go beyond modifying a traditional Buddhist school, practice or
ideology to make it more compatible with modernity, but would involve
rethinking the core ideas on which the very notion of 'Buddhism' is
based. Starting with a critical reading of the four noble truths, as
presented in the Buddha’s first discourse, the author proposes that
instead of thinking of awakening in terms of 'truths' to be understood
one thinks of it in terms of 'tasks' to be accomplished. Such a
pragmatic approach may open up the possibility of going beyond the
belief-based metaphysics of classical Indian soteriology (Buddhism 1.0)
to a praxis-based, post-metaphysical vision of the dharma (Buddhism
2.0)."

Regressives infamously espouse merit, that one must earn their keep. And that their keep is in direct proportion to their performance. Accepting these premises what do these charts tell us about what regressives have earned for their performance? They've earned to be fired is what. See this link to see the image full size; it's too big to fit in the blog correctly.

See the Science Guy below. He puts climate change into simple terms every the mentally challenged can understand. Regressives though are beyond that and have gone pathological and won't get this. So it's for the rest of us with relatively normal brain function.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Continuing from this post here are more excerpts from Murray's article that support issues in this thread:

“The embodied perspective is strongly
supportive of the post-metaphysical stance on ontological issues, which
avoids positing Platonic-type object (and ideals) that are said to exist
outside of both physical reality and subjective (and intersubjective)
reality” (11).

I'd add that it is also a critique of the
Aristotelian model as well, which is of this physical world and its
inter/subjective, necessary and sufficient logical categorical
structure. He seems to address this is statements following the above
quote, but not explicitly. On 14 he goes into the fallibility of
classical rational/logical reasoning, which can be of either or both
types, Platonic and/or Aristotelian.

On
p. 18 he notes that developmental theorists like Commons "controverts
the need for metaphysical propositions to explain higher human
capacities" (18). Yet most all of his criticisms are directly related to
Commons' own formulations per this thread, so not sure why he gives
them a pass.

Friday, December 20, 2013

He starts a discussion of kennilingual ontological pluralism on p. 19
(including Hargens), specifically bringing in the kosmic address. He
says:

"[It] does not address indeterminacy as deeply as Embodied
Realism.... It does not directly address the question of how individuals
operating from the same Kosmic Address might differ in their
conceptualizations. Also it is not yet apparent whether the concept of
Kosmic Address itself is sufficiently determinate" (20).

In response to Wacky Mackey I'm reminded of the Pope's recent words on the topic:

"Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume
that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably
succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the
world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts,
expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding
economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic
system."

Recalling the humble beginnings of Christ in the straw of a manger,
animals all around, Mary and Joseph not being able to afford a doctor
and there was no Obamacare... Today's regressive conservatives would
likely say they were lazy and shiftless and deny them any food to eat.
They have forgotten the origins of their own professed religion, which
they flout when it comes to values but they do not enact any of them. If
Jesus as a strange beggar came knocking on their door for help he would
be turned away. And that's the thing, the poorest and weakest among us
have Jesus in them too, and deserve our respect and help. With the
regressives set on ending the extension of unemployment benefits a few
days after Christmas, as well as gutting food stamps, we all need to
descend on them with the wrath of Jesus to the moneychangers and tell
them to do what Jesus would do.

Greetings and salutations to all in this season of celebration, whatever
that is for you. I celebrate the return of the sun after the darkest
night of the year (solstice). It takes a few days after that for the sun
to start climbing in the sky again, but only if, like with Tinker Bell,
we celebrate whatever it is we believe in.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

While many regressives oppose Obamacare as a whole, and only because they've been programmed to respond that way in a knee-jerk fashion, nevertheless when polled on the actual provisions of Obamacare Republicans are statistically in favor of many of them. You will never see these stats on Faux Snooze. See this article for more. A few examples:

"80 percent of Republicans -- yes, Republicans -- like the idea of health insurance marketplaces, also known as "exchanges."

"Likewise, 57 percent of Republicans like the idea of the government
helping to pay the cost of premiums via insurance subsidies.

This issue came up today in a discussion so here are some excerpts from my previous posts on the topic. They are from different posts in different discussion threads so lack coherent continuity as in an essay or academic presentation.

Kennilingam does posit the Causal, which is in a sense
withdrawn. But not in the OOO (and Bhaskar?) way. Per the Lingam the
Causal can be directly experienced, apparently in toto, via the nirodha
meditative state. My
take is that the withdrawn is real in an ontological sense but is not
the kind of firm foundation we see in a metaphysics of presence, since
it is not wholly present or given. Or wholly absent, for that matter,
since it is not Whole. In that sense it seems well akin to Kant's
unknowable, but is a thing in itself? It seems a thing in itself implies
something wholly present as given, whereas Bryant's objects are always
constructed and at least partially present, partially withdrawn.

See this article for details. The Volcker Rule was finally approved last week and this is supposed to keep the big banks from committing the same kind of fraud that created the financial meltdown. However it was written "with 'help' of lobbyist-lawyers furnished by the banks themselves." Yeah, that will keep those banks in check...

"Wal-Mart's low wages have led to full-time employees seeking public
assistance. These are not the 47 percent, lazy, unmotivated bums.
Rather, these are people working physical, often difficult jobs. They
receive $2.66 billion in government help each year (including $1 billion
in healthcare assistance). That works out to about $5,815 per worker.
And about $420,000 per store. But the federal and state aid varies
widely; in Wisconsin, a study found that it was at least $904,542 a year
per store.

"Why, I keep asking myself, do we effectively want to subsidize a private
company’s employees? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to raise the
minimum wage to a level that a full-time worker could support the
average American family of four? Just $11.33 puts a 40-hour employee
over the poverty line. The costs of this increase would be borne by the
company and its consumers -- not the taxpayer.

Recall this post on the dialogues between Sheldrake, McKenna and Abraham. Of possible interest is a recent dialogue on morphogenetic fields between Frank Visser, Rupert Sheldrake and Andy Smith at Integral World. I've linked to each one's contribution in their names.

From this post, distinguishing Merleau-Ponty's hyper-dialectic from the usual kind:

“What we call hyper-dialectic is a thought that, on the contrary, is
capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the
plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. The
bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic
thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and
synthesis; the good dialectic is that which is conscious of the fact
that every thesis is an idealization, that Being is not made up of
idealizations or of things said… but of bound wholes where signification
never is except in tendency” (VI 94)."

"Merleau-Ponty’s hyper-dialectic is envisaged as being a situational
thought that must criticize all thinking that ignores the conditional
nature of idealizations, and it must also maintain a vigilance to ensure
that it does not itself become one of them. This is why Merleau-Ponty
describes his project as propounding an ‘indirect’ ontology, rather than
a direct ontology (VI 179)."
MP's emphasis on the conditional nature of idealizations is another
way of saying the metaphysics of presence, which is one of those assumed
presuppositions in scientific objectivism and the 'bad dialectic.'

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Along the line of recent posts on Rifkin's ecological consciousness I'm reading sections of Faber's chapter in Theopoetic Folds referenced in another thread. An excerpt:

"Whitehead addresses the same problem of exclusion from and of
multiplicity in terms of our projective epistemologies in which, since
Aristotle and with Kant, we have closed the human mind off from [...] eco-nature. [...] Whitehead suggests that such isolation is an emergent
in the evolutionary process for reasons of survival, orientation and
directionality of organisms. However, it becomes toxic when when it
closes itself from its primary inclusion with a realm of feelings of the
multiplicity of nature in us. [...] Whitehead suggests, as Derrida
would later, that we need to reconnect with the enveloping nature beyond [...] isolating self-presence [...] where we become multiplicity [...] amid a democracy of fellow creatures" (226).

I referenced Thakchoe's article by the above name previously in this post. I've
culled some excerpts from it below
resonant with themes and discussions in this blog and previously in
the Batchelor thread, particularly the difference between rangtong and
shentong. Hence when Thakchoe references "Prasangika" he means the
rangtong, since some variants of shentong are also Prasangika. See the Batchelor thread for more info. More commentary follows the excerpts below.

"Tsongkhapa claims that the Prāsaṅgika posits all realities through
the force of linguistic convention: language and ontology are
understood to be mutually embedded within each other. [...] Neither
language nor ontology has priority over each other" (427-8).

"The Prāsaṅgika therefore disagrees fundamentally with
Dignāga-Dharmakı̄rtian idea that [...] reality and language stand apart
from each other independently and constitutively. […] Reality can never
be a linguistic entity, it must be an ineffable—extra-linguistic and
non-conceptual whereas language is always divorced from reality,
operating purely at the conceptual level" (428).

"Candrakı̄rti argues that all determinate categories, sensory
faculties, and phenomenological experiences are dependent on our
conceptual constructs, and these in turn depend on the conventional
terminologies of everyday language. Candrakı̄rti’s argument, then, is
that cognitions apprehend the objects of experience, and those objects
that we experienced are conceptually (therefore linguistically)
represented in the cognitions as having the representations of some
specific categories" (431-2).

See the below from Senator Warren. Note that this is not asking us to hire workers incapable of performing a job, or giving a job to someone unqualified or with a bad employment record. It's just asking that credit history not be a defining criteria, given that many might have bad credit through no fault of their own because of the economic circumstances created by the financial crises. Yes, some have bad credit due to their own irresponsibility, but that behavior will also likely reflect in their employment history, and it is the latter upon which employment hiring decisions should be made. From Warren:

"Much of America – hard-working, bill-paying America – has a damaged credit rating.
There are a lot of different reasons, but a lot of people just caught a
bad break. They got sick. Their husband left or their wife died. They
lost their job.
Problems only got worse after the financial crisis. Shrinking home
prices made it impossible to sell or refinance a home. People lost their
small businesses. Smaller savings left people without much cushion to
ride out the tough times. People missed a payment or went into debt.
Most people recognize that bad credit means they will have trouble
borrowing money or they will pay more to borrow. But many don't realize
that a damaged credit rating can also block access to a job.

It was once thought that credit history would provide insight into
someone's character, and many companies routinely require credit reports
from job applicants. But research has shown that an individual's credit
rating has little or no correlation with his ability to succeed at
work. A bad credit rating is far more often the result of unexpected
personal crisis or economic downturn than a reflection of someone's
abilities.

Today,
along with Senators Blumenthal, Brown, Leahy, Markey, Shaheen, and
Whitehouse, I am introducing a bill to stop employers from requiring
prospective employees to disclose their credit history or disqualifying
applicants based on a poor credit rating.

Layman Pascal said in this IPS post: "Dissonant conditions, energetic instability, entropy, etc. can operate as transformational drivers." See that post and a few above for his investigation into this dynamic. My response from that thread follows. Of course this only works for those with progressive worldviews; regressives just ignore the dissonance. (See this post, #12.)

Monday, December 16, 2013

Krugman nails it as usual. Obama and the Democrats actually enacted a number of GOP proposals into Obamacare, like higher deductibles, competition in exchanges, limited networks and cuts in Medicare. And now the regressives are railing against the very things they supported. Regressives will talk a good game but have absolutely no intention of every enacting any of the policies they espouse. It is empty rhetoric to distract from the fact that they've never enacted such policies when they have the power.

"Republicans don’t want to help the unfortunate. They’ll
propound health-care ideas that will, they claim, help those with
preexisting conditions and so on — but those aren’t really proposals,
they’re diversionary tactics designed to stall real health reform. Chait
finds Newt Gingrich more or less explicitly admitting this."

See this story. JP Morgan was up on charges that it ignored obvious signs of Bernie Madoff's frauds. But instead of the US criminally prosecuting them they cut a deal, allowing JPM to pay a $2 billion settlement and offering them a deferred prosecution agreement. The latter means we know JPM broke the law but they don't have to admit it, and that if they behave going forward no criminal charges will be filed. And this from a US prosecutor who previously claimed banks should not be too big to jail, yet again showing they are tough on talk but lack the balls to actually do it. And this is the 3rd time in 2 years JPM has been giving a get-out-of-jail-free card. This is criminal corruption of our entire legal system.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

See this article where The Integral Center
of Boulder has "voluntarily relinquished their rights to control their
company as owners. Instead, they have ceded authority to a
purpose-centered governance process called Holacracy, a model that distributes authority across the organization and gives primary power to the organization itself."

I also
contacted Holacracy One and asked what their pay ratio is from highest
to lowest paid. The answer was 3 to 1. I was also led to this link, which says in part:

See Taibbi's article as more evidence emerges that predatory lenders intentionally took advantage of vulnerable borrowers. Therein he said it "should put to lie once and for all the oft-repeated myth [...] that the financial crisis was caused by the government 'forcing' banks to lend to poor people. In reality, of course, the subprime bubble exploded because financial
companies and banks were in a mad rush to get as many iffy borrowers
into loans as quickly as possible – and not because they were forced to,
but because they made assloads of money doing so." And they did so by betting against the bundled loans, knowing they'd fail because they were in fact designed to do so. As did the rating services who gave them secure ratings so they could be sold en masse, thereby also committing fraud. And all of them knowing full well it would crash the economy but who gives a shit, they made a fortune with this scam.

This is dictionary.com's word of the day and means "hatred or dislike of what is new or represents change." It's a dysfunctional condition endemic to regressives. Or as someone aptly put it, "It's a bunch of fat white guys afraid of change." Recall this post on the phenomenon (see #9). Of course it's a 'big' word, and that scares these anti-intellectuals as well. So I doubt you'll hear them using it any time soon.

If you follow media by now you're heard that Megyn Kelly of Faux Snooze unequivocally asserted that both Santa and Jesus are white. "It's a verifiable fact" she confidently attested. We all know 'facts' to Faux mean unsubstantiated and ideological statements, not the usual meaning to the rest of us. Yet the actual facts of the matter are the following:

"Santa Claus can be traced to a real life monk named St. Nicholas who lived in what is today Turkey, according to the History Channel.
Jesus Christ was born to a Jewish family around what is now Israel, and
his race has long been debated with several scholars saying he likely
looked like what many modern day people of Middle Eastern descent look
like."

Here's another Rifkin article
from 2010. The following short excerpt shows the stark difference
between status hierarchies inherent to the capitalistic Enlightenment
paradigm, which focuses on individual self-reliance, and democracies
that express empathy for all. He even notes that the more empathetic a
society is the more democratic. To wit, northern Europe. The more
individualistic, the less democratic and the more totalitarian and
feudal. To wit, the US. No surprise then that "income inequality and relative povertyin the United States are among the highest in the OECD and have substantially increased over the past decades" (see this OECD report).

Thursday, December 12, 2013

"The real crisis lies in the set of assumptions about human nature
that governs the behavior of world leaders--assumptions that were
spawned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago at the dawn of
the modern market economy and the emergence of the nation state era. The
Enlightenment thinkers--John Locke, Adam Smith, Marquis de Condorcet
et. al.--took umbrage with the Medieval Christian world view that saw
human nature as fallen and depraved and that looked to salvation in the
next world through God's grace. They preferred to cast their lot with
the idea that human beings' essential nature is rational, detached,
autonomous, acquisitive and utilitarian and argued that individual
salvation lies in unlimited material progress here on Earth.

Finally. In response to regressive groups who opposed the recent budget deal, even before it was released, House Speaker Boehner said: "When groups come out and criticize something they've never seen, you begin to wonder just how credible those actions are. [...] And frankly I just think they've lost all credibility." It's about time he stood up to the Tea Party, who are so blinded by ideology that they refuse to accept anything from the opposition. Which is far different than my opposition to some of the budget deal after I learned about it, while still agreeing with other parts of it.

"A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection. [...] It solved apparent inconsistencies between quantum physics and Einstein's theory of gravity."

Under
the plan, millions of people in neighborhoods and communities, as well
as hundreds of thousands of businesses, will be able to produce their
own green electricity locally and share it on a national energy
Internet, just like they now create and share information online.

The
distributed, collaborative, peer-to-peer, and laterally scaled energy
infrastructure will fundamentally alter the economic life of China,
while establishing its commanding leadership in the next great economic
revolution.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Earlier today I got an email from Organizing for America asking me to support the budget deal worked out on a bi-partisan basis in the Senate. It's rationale was that both sides were working together, making compromises, and that's what we need to move the country forward. But when we compromise our fundamental progressive values in this deal, especially when it hurts people at the lower socio-economic spectrum, is that an acceptable compromise? And does not require any sacrifice from those most well off? I think not. This article lays out the deal, with the regressives "standing firm" and the Democrats, at least the corporate Dems, losing their spine once again and touting compromise with sadistic, greedy bastards at the expense of those in need as a solution. John Nichols calls is "cruel and irresponsible," which is being nice.

The following is from Democracy for America:

I expected Republicans to play Scrooge when it comes to holiday season
spending cuts. I didn't expect Democrats to go along so willingly.

Last
night, House and Senate negotiators introduced a "compromise" budget
proposal that slashes federal workers' take home pay and will leave more
than 1.3 million job seekers without unemployment benefits just after
Christmas. It includes no tax increases on the wealthy. It
continues the flow of corporate welfare through tax loopholes. The only
people who will feel the completely unnecessary sting of these cuts are
people who are already struggling to keep themselves afloat.

I've referenced the "real and false reason" IPS thread several times. It started with a discussion at Michael Commons' Yahoo adult development forum. I'll provide a few selected and edited excerpts below but see the thread for the full discussion, which started in 2010 and is still ongoing today. It has a lot more than the below.

Lakoff's
embodied reason seems to call into question the type of abstract
reasoning usually found at the formal operational level. This appears to
be false reasoning based on the idea that reason is abstract,
literal, conscious, can fit the world directly and works by logic (also
see for examplethis article ).
If formal reasoning is false wouldn't this call into question some of
the assumptions of the MHC? That perhaps this "stage" is a dysfunction
instead of a step toward post-formal reasoning? So I'm wondering how the MHC takes into account Lakoff's work here and how it answers his charge of false reason?I'm just wondering about the presuppositions in theories like the MHC.
For example, recall in the same link above that Robinett said the
difference between MHC and prior research was that it was "objective and
mathematical." I asked some questions about these assumptions of
mathematical objectivitiy. They seem to be the same assumptions inherent
in the 17th century notions of reason. In fact logic is based on
mathematical proofs, the latter taken as the ultimate in objectivity.
It's almost as if math is some self-existent thing in the world that we
came along and "discovered." And this objective math proves our
objective modelling.

In this article Laske evaluates two texts on the green economy for dialectical thinking. One is more so than the other but both are deficient in left quadrant elaboration. He notes that in additional to right quadrant structures we also need "a change in the mind-sets of
citizens in industrialized and emerging countries" (20). This entails
"a new paradigm [...] driven by a rethink of the design purpose and
intention of the system including all previous leverage points like
goals, structure, rules, delays and parameters" (20). On 22 he lists
some of the characteristics of this new paradigm:

In re-reading this post I think it deserves reiteration. See the link for the
Laske article, which goes into the important theme of how
developmentalists are usually unconscious of the societal memes that not
only influence how they structure their models but also reinforce the
dominant societal socio-economic system. Sound familiar? My comments
from that post:

Some excerpts from Otto Laske’s article
in the Aug/Nov ’13 issue of ILR follow. The first 2 paragraphs question
the scientific or ‘objective’ facts claimed by developmentalists and
see them more as a product of their unconscious societal biases. One of
those biases is that very blindness in accepting the modernist (formal)
premises of a pure objectivity apart from more subjective biases, as if
science or math could get outside of context and determine the final
‘truth’ of things. Such a blindness then doesn’t even recognize the
societal shifts necessary for personal transformation, instead assuming
that it’s all a personal quest and responsibility, the very values
inherent to that status quo, modernist and capitalist system that only
accepts personal responsibility as legitimate via this formal and
metaphysical logic. All we need do is get them to personally grow and
send them back into the shark-pit of the capitalist workforce, as if
they then have the personal power and will to overcome it.

While the official
7 percent unemployment rate in November was the lowest in five years,
long-term unemployment remained near record highs. More than 1.3
million Americans without jobs for six months or more face an unemployment
insurance cutoff at the end of December. Another 1.9 million workers
would have their benefits cut later in the coming year. Bernie joined
31 other senators who signed a letter urging Congress to preserve
federal unemployment insurance for another year. New research from the
National Employment Law Project shows that unemployment insurance keeps
workers in the job hunt and families out of poverty.

An explosive new report from the Guardian reveals that the
right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council—more commonly known as
“ALEC”—is facing a major funding crisis in the wake of the Trayvon
Martin tragedy. But they’re not going down without a fight.

According the Guardian, ALEC is launching major counteroffensive to woo back big corporate supporters they’ve lost.

We’ve worked hard to expose ALEC’s right-wing agenda—like their support
of Florida’s “stand your ground” gun law—and they’re reeling as result
of it: Over 60 corporations and 400 state legislators have dropped their
support of ALEC over the past two years, including VISA just last week.
That’s why they’ve launched the “Prodigal Son Project” to get their big
corporations back on their side.

We can’t let big corporations like Amazon, McDonald’s and others go back
to ALEC. We need to let them know that their support of this right-wing
group is unacceptable.

The petition reads:"Congress: Say NO to
fast-track trade authority and other undemocratic attempts to prevent
Congress from fully vetting secret trade deals like the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. It’s your job to ensure trade deals work for everyone, not
just giant corporations, and it would be deeply irresponsible for you to
ignore that responsibility by supporting fast-track trade authority."

Automatically add your name:

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has been called "SOPA on steroids" -- and for good reason.

Negotiated behind closed doors by the governments of a dozen countries
(including ours) colluding with corporate interests, this secret "trade"
deal (much of which has little to do with actual trade) would grant
unprecedented snooping and censorship powers to ISPs, copyright holders,
and governments.

A draft of the "intellectual property rights" chapter of the TPP was
leaked recently, and according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it
"reflects a terrible but unsurprising truth: an agreement negotiated in
near-total secrecy, including corporations but excluding the public,
comes out as an anti-user wish list of industry-friendly policies."1

The first stage in the plan to pass the TPP is a big push for Congress
to pass fast-track trade authority, which would short-circuit the
typical legislative process when trade deals like the TPP come up for a
vote.